There’s
been nothing like this since Washington forded the Rubicon or Trump crossed the
Delaware or delivered the Gettysburg Address (you know, the one that began[3]“Four score
and eleven women ago...”)—or pick your own seminal moment in American history.

Billions of
words, that face, those gestures, the endless insults[4], the
abused women and the emails, the 24/7 spectacle of it all... Whatever happens
on Election Day, let’s accept one reality: we’re in a new political era in this
country. We just haven’t quite taken it in. Not really.

Forget
Donald Trump.

Doh! Why
did I write that? Who could possibly forget the first presidential candidate in
our history preemptively unwilling[5] to
accept election results? (Even the South in 1860 accepted the election of
Abraham Lincoln before trying to wave goodbye to the Union.) Who could forget
the man who claimed[6] that
abortions could take place on the day of or the day before actual birth? Who
could forget the man who claimed in front of an audience of nearly 72 million[7] Americans
that he had never met[8] the
women who accused him of sexual aggression and abuse, including the People magazine reporter[9] who
interviewed him? Who could forget the candidate who proudly cited[10]his positive polling results
at rallies and in tweets, month after month, before (when those same polls
turned against him) discovering that they were all “rigged[11]”?

Whatever
you think of The Donald, who in the world—and I mean the whole wide world
(including the Iranians[12])—could
possibly forget him or the election he’s stalked[13] so
ominously? When you think of him, however, don’t make him the cause of American
political dysfunction. He’s just the bizarre, disturbed, and disturbing symptom
of the transformation of the American political system.

Admittedly,
he is a one-of-a-kind “politician,” even among his associates in surging
right-wing nationalist and anti-whatever movements globally. He makes France’s
Marine Le Pen seem like the soul of rationality and Philippine President
Rodrigo Duterte look like a master tactician of our age. But what truly makes
Donald Trump and this election season fascinating and confounding is that we’re
not just talking about the presidency of a country, but
of the country. The United States remains the great imperial
state on Planet Earth in terms of the reach of its military and the power of
its economy and culture to influence the workings of everything just about
everywhere. And yet, based on the last strange year of election campaigning,
it’s hard not to think that something—and not just The Donald—is unnervingly
amiss on Planet America.

The World
War II Generation in 2016

Sometimes,
in my fantasies (as while watching the final presidential debate), I perform a
private miracle and bring my parents back from the dead to observe our American
world. With them in the room, I try to imagine the disbelief many from that
World War II generation would surely express about our present moment. Of
course, they lived through a devastating depression, light years beyond
anything we experienced in the Great Recession of 2007-2008, as well as a
global conflagration of a sort that had never been experienced and—short of
nuclear war—is not likely to be again.

Despite
this, I have no doubt that they would be boggled by our world and the
particular version of chaos we now live with. To start at a global level, both
my mother (who died in 1977) and my father (who died in 1983) spent decades in
the nuclear age, the era of humanity’s greatest—for want of a better
word—achievement. After all, for the first time in history, we humans took the
apocalypse out of the hands of God (or the gods), where it had resided for
thousands of years, and placed it directly in our own. What they didn’t live to
experience, however, was history’s second potential deal-breaker, climate
change, already bringing upheaval to the planet, and threatening a slow-motion
apocalypse of an unprecedented sort.

While
nuclear weapons have not been used since August 9, 1945[14], even if they
have spread to the arsenals[15]of numerous
countries, climate change should be seen as a snail-paced version of nuclear
war—and keep in mind that humanity is still pumping[16] near-record
levels of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. I imagine my parents’ amazement
that the most dangerous and confounding issue on the planet didn’t get a single question[17], not to
speak of an answer, in the three presidential debates of 2016, the four and a
half hours of charges, insults, and interruptions just past. Neither a
moderator, nor evidently an undecided voter (in the town hall second debate),
nor either presidential candidate—each ready to change the subject on a
moment’s notice from embarrassing questions about sexual aggression, emails, or
anything else—thought it worth the slightest attention. It was, in short, a
problem too large to discuss, one whose existence Donald Trump (like just about
every other Republican) denies, or rather, in his case, labels a “hoax” that he
uniquely blames[18] on
a Chinese plot[19] to
sink America.

So much for
insanity (and inanity) when it comes to the largest question of all. On a
somewhat more modest scale, my mom and dad wouldn’t have recognized our
political world as American, and not just because of Donald Trump. They would
have been staggered by the money pouring into our political system—at
least $6.6 billion[20] in
this election cycle according to the latest estimate, more than 10% of that
from only 100 families. They would have been stunned by our 1% elections[21]; by our
new Gilded Age[22]; by a
billionaire TV celebrity running as a “populist” by riling up once Democratic
working-class whites immiserated by the likes of him and his “brand” of casino
capitalism, scam, and spectacle; by all those other billionaires pouring[23] money
into the Republican Party to create a gerrymandered Congress that will do their
obstructionist bidding; and by just how much money can be “invested” in our
political system in perfectly legal ways these days. And I haven’t even
mentioned the Other Candidate, who spent all of August on the true “campaign
trail,” hobnobbing[24]not with
ordinary Americans but with millionaires and billionaires[25] (and
assorted celebrities[26]) to build
up her phenomenal “war chest[27].”

I would
have to take a deep breath and explain to my parents that, in
twenty-first-century America, by Supreme Court decree, money has become the
equivalent of speech, even if it’s anything but “free.” And let’s not forget
that other financial lodestone for an American election these days: the
television news, not to speak of the rest of the media. How could I begin to
lay out for my parents, for whom presidential elections were limited fall
events, the bizarre nature of an election season that starts with media
speculation about the next-in-line just as the previous season is ending, and
continues more or less nonstop thereafter? Or the spectacle of talking heads
discussing just about nothing but that election 24/7 on cable television for
something like a full year, or the billions of ad dollars[28] that
have fueled[29] this
never-ending Super Bowl of campaigns, filling[30] the
coffers of the owners of cable and network news?

We’ve grown
strangely used to it all, but my mom and dad would undoubtedly think they were
in another country—and that would be before they were even introduced to the
American system as it now exists, the one for which Donald Trump is such a
bizarre front man.

What Planet
Is This Anyway?

I wish I
still had my high school civics text. If you’re of a certain age, you’ll
remember it: the one in which a man from Mars lands on Main Street, USA, to be
lectured on the glories of American democracy and our carefully constructed,
checked-and-balanced tripartite form of governance. I’m sure knowledge of that
system changed life on Mars for the better, even if it was already something of
a fantasy here on Earth in my parents’ time. After all, Republican President
Dwight D. Eisenhower—my mom and dad voted for Democrat Adlai Stevenson[31]—was the
one who, in his farewell address[32] in
1961, first brought “the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power”
and “the military-industrial complex” to the attention of the American people.

Yes, all of
that was already changing then, as a peacetime war state of unparalleled size
developed in this country. Still, 30-odd years after my father’s death,
surveying the American landscape, my parents might believe themselves on Mars.
They would undoubtedly wonder what exactly had happened to the country they
knew. After all, thanks to the Republican Party’s scorched-earth tactics in
these last years in bipolar Washington, Congress, that collection of putative
representatives of the people (now a crew of well-paid, well-financed
representatives of the country’s special interests in a capital overrun with
corporate lobbyists), hardly functions anymore. Little of significance makes it
through the porticos of the Capitol. Recently, for instance, John McCain
(usually considered a relatively “moderate” Republican senator) suggested[33]—before
walking his comments part way back[34]—that if
Hillary Clinton were elected president, his fellow Republican senators might
decide a priori not to confirm a single Supreme Court justice
she nominated during her tenure in office. That, of course, would mean a court
now down to what looks like a permanent crew of eight would shrink accordingly.
And his comments, which once would have shocked Americans to the core, caused
hardly a ripple of upset or protest.

On my tour
of this new world, I might start by pointing out to my mom and dad that the U.S.
is now in a state of permanent war[35], its
military at the moment involved in conflicts in at least six countries[36] in
the Greater Middle East and Africa. These are all purely presidential
conflicts, as Congress no longer has a real role in American war-making (other
than ponying up the money for it and beating the drums to support it). The
executive branch stands alone when it comes to the war powers once checked and
balanced in the Constitution.

And I
wouldn’t want my parents to simply look abroad. The militarization of this
country has proceeded apace and in ways that, I have not the slightest doubt,
would shock them to their core. I could take my parents, for instance, to Grand
Central Station in midtown Manhattan, their hometown and still mine, and on any
day of the week they would see the once-inconceivable: actual armed soldiers on
guard in full camo. I could mention that, at my local subway stop, I’ve several
times noted a New York police department counterterror squad that could be
mistaken for a military Special Ops team, assault rifles slung across their
chests, and no one even stops and gawks anymore. I could point out that the
police across the country increasingly have the look[37] of
military units and are supplied[38] by
the Pentagon with actual weaponry and equipment directly off distant U.S.
battlefields, including armored vehicles[39] of
various sorts. I could mention that military surveillance drones, those
precursors of future robotic warfare[40] (and,
for my parents, right out of the childhood sci-fi novels I used to read), are
now regularly in American skies[41]; that
advanced surveillance equipment developed in far-off war zones is now being used[42] by
the police here at home; and that, though political assassination was
officially banned[43] in
the post-Watergate 1970s, the president now commands a formidable CIA drone
force that regularly carries out[44] such
assassinations across large swaths of the planet, even against U.S. citizens[45], and
without the say-so of anyone outside the White House, including the courts. I
could mention that the president who, in my parents’ time, commanded one
modest-sized secret army, the CIA’s paramilitaries, now essentially presides
over a full-scale secret military, the Special Operations Command: 70,000 elite troops[46] cocooned
inside the larger U.S. military, including elite teams ready to be deployed[47] on
what are essentially executive missions across the planet.

I could
point out that, in the twenty-first century, U.S. intelligence has set up
a global surveillance state[48] that
would have shamed the totalitarian powers of the previous century and that
American citizens, en masse, are included in it; that our emails (a new concept
for my parents) have been collected[49] by
the millions and our phone records made available[50] to
the state; that privacy, in short, has essentially been declared un-American. I
would also point out that, on the basis of one tragic day and what otherwise
has been the most modest[51] of
threats to Americans, a single fear—of Islamic terrorism—has been the pretext
for the building of the already existing national security state into an
edifice of almost unbelievable proportions[52] that
has been given once unimaginable powers, funded[53] in ways[54] that
should amaze anyone (not just visitors from the American past), and has become
the unofficial fourth branch[55] of
the U.S. government without either discussion or a vote.

Little that
it does—and it does a lot—is open to public scrutiny. For their own “safety,”
“the People” are to know nothing of its workings (except what it wants them to
know). Meanwhile, secrecy of a claustrophobic sort has spread across
significant parts of the government. The government classified 92 million documents[56] in
2011 and things seem not to have gotten much better since. In addition, the
national security state has been elaborating a body of “secret law[57]”—including
classified rules, regulations, and interpretations of already existing law—kept
from the public and, in some cases, even from congressional oversight
committees.

Americans,
in other words, know ever less about what their government does in their name
at home and abroad.

I might
suggest to my parents that they simply imagine the Constitution of the United
States being rewritten and amended in secrecy and on the fly in these years
without as much as a nod to “We, the People.” In this way, as our elections
became elaborate spectacles, democracy was sucked dry and ditched in all but name—and
that name is undoubtedly Donald J. Trump.

Consider
that, then, a brief version of how I might describe our new American world to
my amazed parents.

America as
a National Security State

None of
this is The Donald’s responsibility. In the years in which a new American
system was developing, he was firing people on TV. You could, of course, think
of him as the poster boy for an America in which spectacle, celebrity, the
gilded class of One Percenters, and the national security state have melded
into a narcissistic, self-referential brew of remarkable toxicity.

Whether
Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is elected president, one thing is obvious: the
vast edifice that is the national security state, with its 17[58] intelligence agencies
and enormous imperial military, will continue to elaborate itself and expand
its power in our American world. Both candidates have sworn[59] to pour[60] yet
more money into that military and the intelligence and Homeland Security
apparatus that goes with it. None of this, of course, has much of anything to
do with American democracy as it was once imagined.

Someday
perhaps, like my parents, “I” will be called back from the dead by one of my
children to view with awe or horror whatever world exists. Long after the
America of an unimaginable Donald J. Trump presidency or a far-more-imaginable
Hillary Clinton version of the same has been folded into some god-awful,
half-forgotten chapter in our history, I wonder what will surprise or confound
“me” then. What version of our country and planet will “I” face in 2045?

"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs